Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Darkmoon Dirigible and Kul Tiras

Going back to look, I think I officially started collecting Darkmoon Faire tokens with the intention of getting the Darkmoon Dirigible back in November of 2017. I already had a bit of a jump on it, having found a character with a couple hundred prize tickets already in hand. This was because I have been in the habit of running alts through Darkmoon Faire to boost their trade skills when it is up and I am subscribed. This is why all my alts can fish, as I explained.

Anyway, with the coming of the Darkmoon Faire earlier this month I finally had 1,000 prize tickets on hand so was able to add the Darkmoon Dirigible mount to my collection.

Flying over Stormwind in the Darkmoon Dirigible

I would have, could have, should have gotten it earlier, except that I took a break from World of Warcraft about when the alpha for Battle for Azeroth was hitting. I figured it was a good point for a break before the pre-expansion events came along. I already had the allied races unlocked and what not.

Of course in hindsight I wonder if I should have stayed subscribed and just run the DMF event a few more times, as on my return to Azeroth I found that Blizzard had been messing with trade skills again. The first thing I found was that you no longer got your trade skills raised when you boosted a level 60+ character, a bit of a blow since I went to boost a character just a week after they made this change. An opportunity lost.

And then Darkmoon Faire came around in August and I saw that the trade skill quests were no longer giving you the promised +5 boost to your skill when you turned them in. I figured they would have to fix this sooner rather than later. This seems like one of those changes in one location that broke something elsewhere. However, Blizz came back and said that they meant to do this, that those quests would only give you a boost to your level 1-60 trade skills, which seemed rather useless in the new “segmented by expansion” trade skill reality of Battle for Azeroth.

With the trade skill masterplan seeming to be arranged to allow to people by bypass the mostly useless vanilla recipes, why would Blizz then make those the only thing you can boost with the DMF quests? That seems backwards. It certainly killed an incentive I had to visit DMF with alt, since they are almost all past 300 at this point. I already have all the heirloom gear and pets and mounts from the event.

But it feel like Blizz has been struggling with trade skills for a few expansions now. Warlords of Draenor trivialized them in the extreme, the Legion attempted to revive them by forcing you to do group content to obtain recipes to advance them, and now this with BfA.

And the response to all of this sort of thing, the change to boosts, the change to DMF quests, the ilevel scaling issues, the warfront complaints, has been pretty much summed up as, “we know and we don’t care.”

Not that I think a company has to jump and change things the moment anybody complains. But when they address something like the fact that leveling up gets harder as your ilevel increases… basically, you are incentivized to not upgrade your gear… by saying they are aware of the issue but they don’t think it is important enough to fix, it does give one pause.

I’m not up in arms ready to rebel against Blizzard, but neither am I feeling the warm fuzzies from them either. They have an agenda and my own play style just doesn’t fit into that.

Meanwhile, my enthusiasm for adventuring in Kul Tiras seems to have waned. At one point I was happily logging in every night to take on the next set of quests and see the beautiful world that Blizz had built, and then I stopped logging in. Syp was attempting to make a virtue out of slowness by announcing that he was going to be the last person to hit level 120 in BfA. But when he made it there with his first character my main was still 117, only a zone and a half into Kul Tiras.

I am not sure what happened there. It wasn’t the ilevel thing. That was easily solved by downgrading my gear.

I know I tend to hit a post-launch point during an expansion cycle where I take a break while Blizz fills out the content of an expansion. Then, when they finally get around to announcing that flying is possible to unlock, I show back up and carry on with that as my over-arching goal. But I don’t think I am there yet.

Always another problem to solve… with violence

I also haven’t done any of the dungeons yet. This is because I have gotten to the point where I don’t want to do them with dungeon finder groups. Or, rather, that I want to be able to do them with a group at least once that goes through an instance slowly enough for me to absorb what is going on and catch the details. That is simply impossible with dungeon finder, where every group ends up an exercise in trying to keep up with the tank who is determined to get things done at max speed. Of course, if the tank dares to slow down somebody in the group will start nagging about the slackening pace, so you can’t really blame the tank. Players will always optimize over time, and in this case it means going as fast as possible.

I miss the old days of the instance group when we could run an instance at our leisure.

Without dungeons as a draw, it is pretty much just the overland content for me, so if my interest flags there that is pretty much it.

But I have also been distracted by other titles, about which I will write in further posts. So maybe it is a minor break from the game. But enthusiasm around the house for WoW has been at low ebb since my daughter returned to school. We were both big on the expansion when it first hit, but then school started and she has been busy with that. She is a much better student than I was at that age.

That is where I stand at the moment. My main is 117 and about halfway through the Kul Tiras campaign. I have a Horde alt that is hanging out in Zandalar and an Alliance alt that is in Kul Tiras, but both are still 110. I also managed to push another alt up to level 110 by leveling up battle pets in Draenor. And then there was the Dakrmoon Dirigible. Not much progress after a month, but in the scope of a two year expansion cycle, not horrible either.

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5 thoughts on “Darkmoon Dirigible and Kul Tiras”

The whole “we know and we don’t care” thing has been puzzling me for a while. I’m not playing WoW, so I have no feel for how the expansion is going down in-game, but I’ve read a lot of blog posts on BfA and the general tenor seems to be very much as you describe: people liked it a lot at first but within a matter of weeks they were expressing either boredom or lack of interest.

A year or three back there was some speculation that Blizzard (or some people high up in the company, at least) were either embarassed or frustrated by WoW’s ongoing success. There was a conspiracy theory going around that some of the less palatable decisions being taken at the time were actually intended to shift focus away from WoW to other Blizzard titles and/or to prove that the whole company wasn’t reliant on WoW for it’s success.

That seemed to subside with the success of Overwatch in particular and also Hearthstone to a degree, as well as with the production of a major WoW movie. Legion seemed like a re-focusing, too. Now, though, we seem to be drifting back to the same territory we were in a few years ago, both with the unambitious nature of the mechanics and the seemingly disinterested attitude of the developers.

Congratulations on the mount :) I started, but then, I ended up realizing how long it would take me, especially with so much other stuff in game to do, so it’s on my To Do List in 10 years or so, hah :)

I hear you on the Dungeons. I have been duoing them with a friend. It gave me a chance to see the encounters, since they last longer than in a LFG, and it game me time to explore them, without the Roadrunner Tank mentality today.

It’s friends that keeps me in the game; I guess you experience the same with your daughter. Which class is she playing? I was wondering; perhaps you could try the duo of Dungeons too :) It was great fun for me, at least.

@bhagpuss- Shooting themselves in the leg to prove they have more than one, metaphorically speaking? Sounds stupid and prideful… which fits human nature. Though cynicism fits me, so of course I’d say that.

Is it possible that the opposite is happening? The game has done so well in the recent past that they feel able to coast for a while? I don’t follow that kind of statistic, so I really don’t know if that could be the case.

@Bhagpuss – I never bought into any of that stuff about an internal faction keen to kill WoW. We know it was the game that grew beyond all expectation and pretty much devoured the company for a few years. If anything, Blizz seems more like a company that has a big winner that has peaked. They know it can only go down from there and internal factions have their own ideas as to what will minimize the drop. So they lurch from one idea to another, none of them very radical lest they rock the boat too much.